another effect devlog! this time about composing methods and cancellation https://macwright.com/2025/12/02/effect-devlog

little effect devlog about runtimes and logging https://macwright.com/2025/11/26/effect-devlog

the process of looking through backlinks to my site is a grim reminder of my last name's utter unspellability

lately i've been wanting to know who links to my website, because i've found some thoughtful responses and riffs on what i wrote, but months later. haven't found a good solution for this: i get some backlinks from ahrefs, but lots of backlink spam and bad visibility into geniunely new links […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tmcw/115582441718385043 i (at work, with val town) do the least popular option, using tsx. haven't found a strong reason to compile with typescript yet, and node's ts support is super tempting but we need jsx syntax because the server sends emails and templates […]

shipped a new feature on https://placemark.io/ that i've had on the list for 3+ years: drawing with automatic routing. represents routes as geometrycollections of points + a linestring. currently uses the mapbox directions api. very beta - there's some […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

little work on https://placemark.io this sunday: fixed undo states, upgraded to react, simplified map rendering a bit https://macwright.com/2025/11/16/placemark-sunday

i haven't written that much about my day job. here in this article, i wrote a lot about it, and even about how we're hiring! https://macwright.com/2025/11/11/val-town

doing little public daily devlogs when i do stuff with #effect because the learning curve can be tough: https://macwright.com/2025/11/07/effect-nov-7-caching

congrats to all the finishers of the new york marathon today! a perfect occasion to write about one of my old hobbyhorses: fewer people should run marathons https://macwright.com/2025/11/02/fewer-people-should-run-marathons

my /micro page grew to be 3mb because I Wrote Too Much so it now has a big pile of links at the bottom, this is one of my semiyearly website tweaks https://macwright.com/micro/

software is so bad

upgrading vitest from 2 to 3 made our tests slower upgrading it from 3 to 4 make our tests even slower than that

staying "hip to it" by trying out anthropic skills https://macwright.com/2025/10/20/agent-skills

this idea from @lifewinning is so cool, i had not heard of inertial navigation https://placing.technology/i-was-in-a-bad-mood-and-i-wrote-down-my-worst-ideas-for-fixing-geo#bring-back-inertial-navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sgillies/115336564527737067 sean is TOUGH

it rocks living in lincoln restler's district in nyc, i get to read articles about him doing cool stuff like actually taking action on tons of illegally parked cars https://hellgatenyc.com/downtown-brooklyn-is-one-big-illegal-parking-lot/

recently: https://macwright.com/2025/10/04/recently

porteur bag v2 update: https://macwright.com/2025/09/27/porteur-bag-2

posted photos from my last bikepacking trip (the c&o+gap, pittsburgh to dc) on the blog https://macwright.com/photos/

decided to write up just all my thoughts about the ar glasses, just to get them out there: https://macwright.com/2025/09/21/cooking-with-glasses

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tmcw/114905822977634292 update: i bought a kobo libra color. impressions so far: - instapaper integration is slick, fast! - color is surprisingly nice for reading articles - display is a little less contrast than my kindles, but is more responsive too - wish it had […]

placemark changelog: exporting shapefiles was broken, is fixed now

keep thinking about this house, the sarimento house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmiento_House

wrote about how i manage npm dependencies, and used it as an excuse to make some watercolors https://blog.val.town/gardening-dependencies

fastmail just launched offline support, continues to be one of my favorite web applications that i use all the time

val.town used to run TypeScript in a Web Worker so that our editor would have autocomplete and language features. it was a total hack and didn't work all that well. our summer intern completely rewrote all of that, creating a session-lived websocket-speaking wrapper for the native deno lsp […]

developed another roll of kodak gold, shot on my olympus xa2

in anticipation of another bike trip, i've constructed porteur bag #2, refined and refreshed. - first bag i've made with a liner! (robic nylon) - structured like a big tote bag but with a zipper and a square footprint - two wire gate clips to make attachment […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

cutting-edge vegan food alert: nature's fynd is made from an acidophilic fungus discovered in the yellowstone supervolcano, and it makes a pretty delicious & relatively healthy yogurt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature%27s_Fynd

the only good laufey review https://www.hearingthings.co/overrated-albums-2025/

every hacker news comment is now "ai is great except it needs a robust system for fromulating widgets" and the author of the comment is the ceo of a yc backed startup for fromulating widgets with ai

more photos from this roll

i've sorta evolved a personal rule to never talk about plans about projects but i'll break that rule and say that next things for macwright.com are probably a subdomain with observablehq notebook-kit visualizations, and eventually tinkering with hosting the whole thing in a github-free fashion

developed photos: more apple picking

developed photos: the brandenburg gate https://macwright.com/2025/08/29/brandenburg

recently: https://macwright.com/2025/08/29/recently

figured out a blog to write as an excuse to make a watercolor painting of my sewing machine my mantra is: all hobbies are part of the same thing, connect them all for strength and longevity

macwright.com seo anecdata: impressions are up, clickthroughs are down, is it the impact of llms, it probably is

developed some photos! enjoying my cadence of posting a photo to my website "once every month or more", nice and slow

when exactly does the universal basic income kick in

Perplexity and Truth Social announced a partnership yesterday, both with exuberance. So, I cancelled my account just now, after figuring out a way to save my threads—they don't provide a way to do so and use that as a scare tactic to prevent cancelling (ref img 1). I also left them a "why" note.

there's a new notebooks 2.0 out from @observablehq and i have written some thoughts and a rough summary of the story so far! https://macwright.com/2025/07/31/observable-notebooks-2

in hindsight i kinda think that my 2020 port of a codebase from rust to rails would have been better off going from rust to elixir/phoenix https://macwright.com/2021/02/18/a-year-of-rails

this weekend's hacking on placemark: removed next.js, swapped it out for vite. simplifying https://macwright.com/2025/07/27/placemark-updates-vite

my short-lived attempt to replace my instapaper+kindle workflow with an instapaper+boox workflow https://macwright.com/2025/07/23/onyx-go-7-as-instapaper

it's pretty surprising that there's no good way to configure stripe - prices, subscription levels, etc - in code. there's a terraform provider but it's third-party and experimental. everyone's plugging away in the stripe dashboard and doing manual config

i find react server components annoying because i don't like them at all but they're also so weird and complicated that any critique i write of them is inevitably going to get something wrong, it's hard to be fully informed about something that i don't want to learn about just so i can say it's […]

max (of okcupid, keybase, sparknotes) is doing it again, he's wild for this one https://blog.foks.pub/posts/introducing/

good ama question https://tmcw-ama.val.run/